In his memoir No Heroes, Chris Offutt attempts to integrate the story of his return to his birthplace of Kentucky with the story of his in-law's time in Nazi concentration camps. At first glance this looks like a highly difficult task to follow through on, which Offutt does not. The disproportionate chapter sizes, lack of transitions and rough sentence structure is uncomfortable to read and comes off as over worked.
             Although No Heroes is a memoir on Offutt's life, he decided to include the stories of his in-laws' experiences during World War II in concentration camps. The way he decides to combine two unrelated stories is by relating them to the reader in alternating chapters. However, the lengths are very un-proportional, which doesn't really do justice for the Holocaust story. Also, Offutt doesn't bother give the reader a transition between stories, and he even admits to his father in-law that he doesn't know how he'll manage to relate the stories.
             Although it may be because he lacked enough material to do so, Offutt makes the chapters about the Holocaust story tiny compared to the chapters about his life. Often, they are only one or two pages. To someone reading the book, the chapters only register as interruptions, when really they should be more thought provoking. Even if they were all put into one chapter somewhere in the book, the reader would be able to engage in the story, learn about the in-laws, and the story would make a more prominent statement. At points, it almost feels as if Offutt added in these alternating chapters so that; because the topic was the Holocaust, the reader would feel they should read on, and then get sucked into the next chapter on Offutt's life, which isn't fair to the reader or to either part of Offutt's book.
             Throughout the book, Offutt tries to create the impression that what we're doing is read
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